Education
Barker earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University and spent two years studying with Kurt Lewin.
Barker earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University and spent two years studying with Kurt Lewin.
Based on this data, Barker first developed the concept of the behavior setting to help explain the interplay between the individual and the immediate environment. Possibly one of the most valuable developments of Barker"s work was the examination of the way in which the number and variety of behavior settings remains remarkably constant even as institutions increased in size. This was explored in his seminal work with Paul Gump published as Barker, R. and Gump, P. (1964) Big School Small School, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
They showed that large schools had a similar number of behavior settings to small schools.
A consequence of this was that students could take many different roles in small schools (eg be in the school band and the school football team), while in larger schools there was a greater tendency to be selective. Barker died at his home in Oskaloosa, Kansas in September 1990.
Barker is the subject of a 2014 biography — The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker — by award-winning American journalist Ariel Sabar.
